iPhone or XO Laptop, Which Is Cooler?

By TFB

If you want a cool gadget for $399, would you buy an iPhone or two of these XO Laptops, one for you and one for a child in a developing country?

The XO Laptop is a cool product from the One Laptop per Child project. It is designed from the ground up as a rugged, inexpensive laptop for children in the developing countries. The goal is to get the cost down to $100 each. It’s not there yet, but today you can donate one for $200. Starting in November, you can pay $400, give one to a child in a developing country, and get one for yourself. 

It’s a cool machine. It has a high resolution screen, wireless networking, web browser, e-mail client, RSS reader, word processor, …, all open source software. It uses very little power, so little it can be charged by human power using a crank, a pedal or a pull cord. If I crank up one of these on a plane or in a meeting with customers, I’m sure it will turn a lot more heads than an iPhone. I’ve got to get one for Christmas.

If $200 or $400 is more than you can give, OLPC Foundation is also taking smaller donations.

What do you think? Is XO Laptop cooler than iPhone?

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Posted on September 28, 2007 under Spending.

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Comments

3 Comments on iPhone or XO Laptop, Which Is Cooler?

  1. Ted on October 1, 2007
     

    Interesting concept and product.

    I don’t understand why children in countries without clean public water, stable food supplies, reliable power, and basic medical care need laptop computers.

    I have lived in the USA my whole life and consider a laptop a luxury item for most people.

    I seriously doubt playing Halo3 or learning what “thanks for add” means is going to make an improvement in their life.

  2. TFB on October 1, 2007
     

    Children lack of access to public water, stable food supplies, or reliable power still need education too. The laptop is just a tool. They talked about loading textbooks onto the laptops. A large amount of text can be stored electronically. It cuts down the cost of printing and distributing textbooks quite a bit.

  3. Anonymous on November 3, 2007
     

    I have to agree with Ted. Having worked in education in developing countries, it’s interesting to see what westerners think people in these countries actually need and quite sad to see the direction that many of them are heading as they trade off their beautiful culture (for an American modeled one), destroy their wonderful natural environments (to build shopping centers and other western staple icons) and their indigenous or local ways of doing things (often far superior and more suited to their context)… to be just like us.

    Westerners are happy to help this process though either through ignorance or arrogance in thinking everyone should do things the way they do or because one day they’ll be loading Microsoft software onto those computers, eating McDonalds or shopping at Gap.

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